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In the old days, the cops had big black books and file cabinets full of mug shots. Whenever a police officer arrested somebody, he would dutifully file the photo by category. And later, when a victim described an assailant with, say, dark hair and a snake tattoo on his left wrist, police called in the poor, traumatized citizen to drive downtown and spend hours poring over thousands of creepy pictures.

This cumbersome process, of course, left substantial room for error. "It became a real logistical problem for the department and for the victims," says Mike Campbell, a Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) captain.

But the MPD has retired those old file cabinets for good. A year ago, the department signed up with San Diego-based ImageWare Systems to store 370,000 photos in a database and make the images available to any officer with a server-connected computer. So instead of filing a formal request for a mug shot and waiting for days to receive it from the downtown police department, an officer types in criteria like "dark hair" and "snake tattoo" and automatically receives potential matches on his screen.

The upgrade wasn't easy. Because the MPD uses seventeen-year-old IBM mainframes, and ImageWare's modern Crime Capture System isn't fully compatible, programmers had to write many new lines of code. But the department was lucky, because the county sheriff's department was ahead of its time. Since the jail was built about a decade ago, prison officials stored digital photos of every inmate—giving the police department a "startup database," as Campbell calls it, of just about every known criminal in the Milwaukee area.


[click for larger image]

Beat cops can take ImageWare on the road to streamline IDs.

Thus, the MPD avoided the cost-prohibitive process of scanning each photo from the file cabinet and storing it in the ImageWare database. And the department can move more quickly into the future. With the photo database available at thirty-two departments throughout the metropolitan area, police officials plan to adapt the information to PDAs and squad-car computers within the next year or two. (ImageWare already supports mobile access methods.)

"The whole goal that we're seeking is to make that available right down to even the beat officer," Campbell says. "It has to be something that isn't going to burden the officer even more—it can't be a big backpack with a battery. They would be much more turned off by that extra horsepower, and less inclined to use it, than if they keep it on their Batman utility belt."

ImageWare's big concept—to help police departments share mug shots electronically within seconds—is hardly complex from a technology perspective. All its Crime Capture System requires is a Hitachi digital camera with pan-and-tilt technology, Microsoft SQL Server database software, and a solid file server. Short of these basic requirements, ImageWare can usually adapt, without much trouble, to existing police hardware.

What's radical about ImageWare's idea is how it makes crime solving immeasurably more efficient while changing police culture. Let's say a woman has her purse stolen and catches a quick glance of the burglar's blonde hair and shoulder scar while he's running away. While these images are fresh in her mind, police can cross-reference her description with every suspect in the database. If she picks out a matching suspect from a set of photos, police can email a "wanted" JPEG to a TV station for broadcast on the evening news. This process used to take days. Today, it takes minutes.

"It gives police access to these photographs immediately, from anywhere—whether they're sitting on horseback or in the precinct or walking down the street. That's the crux of the whole thing," says Bill Ibbetson, ImageWare's chief technology officer and vice president of engineering. "Before, these photos would go into some room where they had banks and banks of drawers. You'd keep your fingers crossed and flip through these photographs manually that hopefully match the individual. That can be an unbelievably laborious situation."



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